“What makes you think you’re always right?” Hana asks at one point, standing behind him, arms folded, the frame neatly divided between red and blue. This is not a permanent condition: Each time they fight, they come apart again.

When they meet, at a party, she is portrayed in red and he in blue, but as they come together as a couple, the lines and colors between them overlap and blur. More to the point, the characters are drawn in different styles - Asterios a mix of geometric lines and circles, almost like an architect’s blueprint Hana in more fuzzy, emotional undertones. On the most basic level, this means giving every character his or her own font for dialogue: Asterios’ words come out boxed and all in capital letters as if to emphasize the certainty of his perspective, while his wife, a sculptress named Hana, speaks in a less rigid typeface, a reflection of her own quiet openness. Here, Mazzucchelli develops a three-dimensional schematic, using the very elements of the comic as part of the emotional template of the work. “Asterios Polyp,” after all, is a novel as a piece of paper architecture, a book in which function follows form.

Asterios would seem to stand against such a process, but among the thrills of the novel is the way Mazzucchelli integrates his character’s unyielding worldview into the marrow of the book. This is a fascinating, and wholly intended, contradiction in a graphic novel, because the form itself is a hybrid, blending visual and narrative strategies, telling its stories in both pictures and words. whose reputation rested on his designs, rather than on the buildings constructed from them.” It’s an important distinction, for Asterios is a theoretician, a connoisseur of dualistic thinking, in which things are either one way or the other, and there’s no ambiguity in between. That period, however, appears to have ended with the publication of Mazzucchelli’s first solo graphic novel, “Asterios Polyp,” the story of a “paper architect. “What I wanted to do was just go back to the roots of what I liked about art in the first place,” he has said of those days, and the same might apply to the last 15 years, in which Mazzucchelli has essentially gone quiet, producing covers for the New Yorker and teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design.

After an apprenticeship in the 1980s drawing superhero comics (including “ Batman: Year One,” with Frank Miller), he spent the early 1990s producing three issues of the comics magazine Rubber Blanket his work on the 1994 adaptation of Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” initiated the Neon Lit series of graphic novels and suggested a new, more nuanced approach to the form.

Asterios polyp